[Upd-discuss] Public Domain is a Crime

[michael.davis@law.csuohio.edu]

You must realize however that those works are derivative works only to the
extent of the new treatment. The underlying original work is still public
domain material and freely useable.


> Quoting Yannick Delbecque <yannick.delbecque@mail.mcgill.ca>:
>
>> [2005-12-16 12:48, P.L.Hayes]
>> > "a film will still be copyrighted even if it is in the public domain"
>> >
>> > "Please let me know what you think about this."
>>
>> Apart from making me speculate about the incompetence of this person,
>> this make me think about ways to promote explicitely the protection and
>> widest possible usage of public domain material.
>>
>> One possible way to achive this could be to legally force anyone using
>> public domain material in a new work or product to identify it
>> explicitely as such. If DVDs were distributed beginning with a video
>> notice like "This work is in the public domain" instead of the overly
>> repeted message that it is criminal to share the movie, many people
>> might start to think about using these work themselves.
>
> This reminds me of a (US) case I recently read that ruled that a video of
> a film
> that had fallen into the public domain due to lack of renewal was still a
> valid
> derivative work and was thus protectable under copyright law. (Maljack
> Prods.
> v. UAV Corp.) The creators of the video had merely digitized the
> soundtrack
> ("sweetened, equalized, balanced, made into stereo" as they claimed) and
> changed the aspect ratio of the film, but the court ruled that this was
> sufficient to constitute a derivative work. Thus by extension, even DVD
> versions of PD films may still be under copyright. I'm not sure if there's
> been
> a case on the DVD issue in particular, but it would be interesting to see.
>
> I find this particularly troubling because many PD films are not available
> in
> digital format (of course we should encourage digitization efforts such as
> by
> the internet archive), and thus since putting a PD film on DVD requires
> audio/video digitization and changing of aspect ratio, PD films released
> on DVD
> can regain copyright protection. Even if a court were to rule that mere
> digitization alone was not sufficient, those creating such DVDs could
> easily
> "sweeten" the soundtrack to make it protectable...
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Yannick Delbecque - http://yannick.delbecque.org
>> Cogitateurs-Agitateurs - http://cogitateurs-agitateurs.org
>> FACIL, pour l'appropriation collective de l'informatique libre -
>> http://facil.qc.ca
>>
>>
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Mickey Davis
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